Just posting here as a continuation of the discussion that was taking place during this months TwitchDev Monthly update about Channel Unfollows.
The gist, or TL:DW (Too long, didn’t watch), is that there is going to be a new Channel Unsubscribe EventSub Event that triggers when a users subscription to a channel expires. Either when a viewer chooses not to renew their active subscription, or when a gifted sub so happens to run out.
Such an Event will open the ability to more closely track subscriptions and subscription counters without any polling of the API. I for one have not used polling of API in a very long time.
Previous Mention
Occasionally it has been brought up in the past; either about PubSub or Webhooks (pre-EventSub) if there would ever be an “Un Follow” Event, an inverse to the “Follow” Event. This would allow similar functionality over finely tracking followers similar to accurately tracking Subscribers.
Generally the concensus when it was brought up previously was that this would open a lot of doorways for abuse; that streamers that have alerts readily available and shown on screen for new followers would also flip that and use the unfollow notification to harass or bully those who chose to unfollow.
This same argument could be said about the new EventSub for unsubscribers, depending on who is making use of it. So that brings up the point, if this now exists, is it be possible that an EventSub for Unfollowers will be added?
Use Case
Personally I think it would be a great feature to have, and would probably use it myself; For a legitimate purpose, and not for harassing those who unfollow. I develop a chat bot, and while it is not an original idea something streamers frequently want is the ability to filter commands by if a user is a follower or not (IIRC this is not an IRCv3 tag). It would be nice to be able to keep my own list of who is followed, rather than sending a request to the API to check every time. This is just one such functionality
Scoped Event
Jon brought up a point during the stream that it’s also possible that an unfollow event might not exist due to follows being publicly available, and subscriptions requiring a scope to see. So possibly an unfollow event could be scoped, so not just anyone can track who is following your channel.
That point though doesn’t really help the “Harassing those who unsub/unfollow” argument though, as the streamer would be the one that would do that in the first place, and they have the ability to grant that scope. The scope would just be to prevent tracking from the average joe.
RFC
If anyone else wants to weigh in on what they may have the use for, or thinks that it’s a bad idea, I’m just posting this here to continue the discussion that was going on with the stream.
Staff could immediately “No” the idea, but comment below and contribute to the discussion.